Essentials: Understanding & Treating Addiction | Dr. Anna Lembke

(soft rock music) Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. And now for my discussion with Dr. Anna Lembke. I and many listeners of this podcast are obsessed with dopamine. What is dopamine, and what are maybe some things about dopamine that most people don't know and probably that I don't know either?

So dopamine is a neurotransmitter, and neurotransmitters are those molecules that bridge the gap between two neurons. So they essentially allow one neuron, the presynaptic neuron, to communicate with the postsynaptic neuron. Um, dopamine is intimately, uh, associated with the experience of reward, but also with movement, which I think is really interesting because movement and reward are linked, right? If you think about, you know, um, early humans, it, you had to move in order to go seek out the water or the, the meat or whatever it was. So, um, dopamine is this really, um, powerful, important molecule in the brain that helps us, um, experience pleasure. It's not the only neurotransmitter involved in pleasure, but it's a really, really important one. And if, if you wanna think about something that most people don't know about dopamine, which, which I think is really interesting, is that we, we are always releasing dopamine at a kind of tonic baseline rate, and it's really the deviation from that baseline rather than, like, hits of dopamine in a vacuum that make a difference. So when we experience pleasure, our dopamine release goes above baseline, and likewise, dopamine can go below that tonic baseline and then we experience a kind of pain.

Interesting. So is it fair to say that one's baseline levels of dopamine, how frequently we're, are releasing dopamine in the absence of some, uh, I don't know, drug, or food, or experience, just sitting, being, uh, is that associated with how happy somebody is, their kind of baseline of happiness or level of depression?

There is evidence that shows that people who are depressed may indeed have lower tonic levels of dopamine. So that's a really reasonable thought, and there's, uh, some evidence to suggest that that may be true. The other thing that we know is that if we, um, expose ourselves chronically to substances or behaviors that repeatedly release large a- amounts of dopamine in our brain's reward pathway that we can change our tonic baseline and actually lower it over time as our brain tries to compensate for all of that dopamine, which is more really than we were designed to, to experience.

Interesting. And is, would, is it, um, the case that our baseline levels of dopamine are set by our genetics, by our heredity?

Well, I think, you know, if you think about sort of y- you know, the early stages of development in infancy, certainly that is true. You're kind of, you know, born with probably whatever is your baseline level. But obviously, your experiences can have a huge impact on where your, your dopamine level ultimately settles out.